Tesla’s stock has remained a polarizing topic, especially as the company’s stock price dropped immensely throughout the last year. Bears and bulls are trying to put Tesla’s incredible growth and industry disruptions over the past few years into a narrative that fits their viewpoints, but an argument between the two … [continued]
Earlier this month, I shared my thoughts about a CNN article that stated that Tesla (TSLA) short sellers lost more than the entire US airline industry in 2020. In that piece, I also shared some thoughts from Jim Chanos, one of Tesla’s most notorious and outspoken short sellers, who happens to still believe that Tesla will fail.
CNN has called Tesla’s incredible year a bloodbath for those who short the company’s stock. Ihor Dusaniwsky, the managing director at S3 and an expert at shorting stocks, told CNN, “There’s nothing that compares to it that I can remember.”
Short sellers have been preying on Tesla stock for years. Have they finally reached their come-uppance? “Most big Tesla shorts aren’t losing sleep or missing meals because of their positions,” Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, told Institutional Investor. “They still think this will eventually go their way.”
“Tesla isn’t a company. It’s a global revolution for clean energy, state-of-the-art mobility, & a better future,” a well known podcaster named Viv tweeted earlier today. I wanted to elaborate on that.
It was just brought to my attention that Jim Chanos, one of Tesla’s fiercest short sellers, who believed/believes Tesla is a fraud, predicted in 2017 that Elon Musk would step down from his position as CEO of Tesla by 2020. He, like many short sellers, also predicted Tesla would go bankrupt, but he did not give a timeframe on that matter. As you can see, this information comes from a Reuters Global Markets Forum tweet from a little more than two years ago. It seems to be the only source of this information.
What is journalism? Is it sharing a story? Is it getting to the truth of something despite the challenges or the consequences? Could it be a journey to the truth?
How do you decide the core message of a story? How do you know when the process of discovery is far enough along to publish your findings? How do you know when you’re ready to have an impact on a reader or viewer who you may never cross paths with?
A year ago, Jim Chanos was a a prominent supposed “expert” on the topic of Tesla [TSLA]. I’ll start out by saying that I’m giving Chanos the benefit of the doubt in this piece and not assuming any nefarious motives. Though, I will summarize a popular theory that disagrees with that assumption as to why he has been so publicly negative about Tesla over the years, and I definitely think the theory could be true.
On a Tesla Motors Club thread, some members there recently shared a few old claims of perennial Tesla bears. It was a brilliant little move of reverse trolling, and it prompted me to do something I’ve been wanting to do for ages — dig up some old claims about Tesla from prominent bears and see how they held up to the light of today.
First of all, let’s be clear — Tesla is such a popular company now that many people in the media have to cover it, or feel inspired to cover it, who know very little about the company, its products, its history, or its finances. Some of those reporters and bloggers may think they got up to speed quickly, got the story straight, and rightfully came in with boxing gloves on to bash the company. The problem is that those people often didn’t get the full story, may have consumed and digested absolutely incorrect information, and may be out of their depths in the general topics they’re briefly covering (manufacturing, finance, cars, technology, etc.). I would say that, by and large, these people aren’t evil — they’ve just been misled.
